Challenges Addressed
- Blended counselling
- Exchange and knowledge transfer (among educational professionals, guidance counsellors, etc.)
- Facilitation of transition from school education to career selection
- Improve matching between skills and jobs
- Improvement of guidance/ employment services
- Increase the interaction between schools and professional life
- Increase the mobility of people in Europe for education and employment purposes
- Promote self-assessment
- Provision of low-threshold information on educational guidance to disadvantaged adult populations
- Raise awareness on guidance
- Reduce early school leaving
- Support those wishing to re-enter the labour market
- Tackling unemployment
- Target unemployment
EURES provides information, advice and recruitment/placement (job-matching) services for the benefit of workers, employers and any citizen wishing to benefit from the principle of free movement of persons.
EURES provides support through EURES Advisers; the EURES Cross-Border Partnerships; the European Job Days, and the EURES Job Mobility Portal, composed of three sections: a) database of job vacancies; b) provision of information related to living and working conditions in European countries, where users can gather LMI in both national and regional level; c) a section for employers to register and search for candidates.
Policy objectives
- Access to Lifelong Guidance Services
- Assessing the effectiveness of Lifelong Guidance Provision
- Assuring the quality of Lifelong Guidance Provision
- Career Management Skills
- Contributing the rise of mobility of people in Europe for education and employment purposes
- Funding Lifelong Guidance Services
- ICT in Lifelong Guidance
- Improving careers information
- Improving employability and supporting older workers
- Interactive online tools
- Raising the skills and qualifications of adults
- Raising the skills and qualifications of young people
- Strategic Leadership
- Supporting people at risk and disadvantaged groups
- Training and Qualifications of Guidance Practitioners
INNOVATIVE ASPECTS OF LMI
- Blended counselling
- Creation of ePortfolios with students' skills and competences
- Crowed sourcing of expert knowledge on educational guidance
- Customisation of LMI through the users' adaptation according to their needs
- Data entered by end-users
- Effective job matching
- Guidance methods
- Informal LMI
- Innovative user profiling
- Interoperability with job-search engines
- Life course related filtering of LMI
- Matching of regional education to labour market
- News relevant to educational guidance
- Occupational information
- One-stop-shop
- Personalised educational advice
- Provision of additional information on the awards not available elsewhere, to make it easily understood to employers and institutions in other countries
- Provision of external links to available EC employment, guidance and educational services
- Real time LMI
- Scientific research on guidance
- Thematic compilation of third party LMI
EURES posts LMI from different sources such as country official websites, public administration portals, government agencies, labour offices, etc. All information on labour market trends and living and working conditions are updated regularly by EURES national correspondents. The information is coming directly from Member States and no regular or official update is foreseen.
Aspects of LMI:
- Overview of labour market information across all EU countries;
- Database of registered vacancies, with sectoral information included;
- Database of candidates, incl. locations with most jobseekers and occupations with most available candidates;
- Statistics on the Top 10 most preferred occupations in a country or a region;
- Information on cross-border employment, via respective partnerships.
INNOVATIVE USE OF ICT
- Combination with offline elements
- Connection with third parties (LMI, PES, etc.)
- Customized RSS feed
- Dynamic interconnection of electronic resources according to a life course approach
- e-portfolio
- Interactive online tools
- Mobile app
- Online counselling
- Online wiki
- Open source
- Personalised information storage
- Quick diagnosis tool
- Social media utilisation
ICT is a critical element of EURES:
- An automatic vacancy count is performed every 30 minutes;
- Jobseekers can perform searches in different languages;
- Each EURES Member State inserts its data by using Open Source Web Services technology.
Some data are directly inserted from country official websites, public administration portals, government agencies or ministries.
Results and impacts obtained
Quantitative results:
- 850 000 people visit the portal every month;
- By March 2015, 146 450 CVs were available;
- A total of 2 508 companies are searching for employees through the EURES portal.
Qualitative results: EURES has improved the quality of respective services; contributed to lasting changes; built awareness on mobility over the period under review; and improved balance between supply and demand of labour in the EU.
Evaluation process: questionnaires & surveys. Until now, such evaluations have not been conducted.
- Budget appropriate to improve efficiency and support the increase of EURES personnel;
- Finance of training sessions and seminars for new or experienced EURES personnel;
- Strong commitment and high qualifications of EURES key personnel;
- Targeted mobility initiatives and joint activities among advisers’ network;
- Cooperation with other European networks;
- Productive cooperation between Public Employment Services.
- No regular updating of information.
- Limited matching capacity.
- Lack of harmonisation of social security and taxation systems.
- Limited monitoring and evaluation of EURES activities.
Transferability elements
What triggered the development of EURES in 1993 was the need for worker mobility from high unemployment areas to those characterised by labour shortages across the EU. The difficulty of companies and countries in finding staff with the right skills for vacant positions and overcoming mismatches in the labour market accelerated the development of EURES services. Finally, the limited intra-EU labour mobility and the need to strengthen the integration of public employment services of the Member States to reach those goals has fuelled EURES as a response.
Around EUR 15 million of which: 33% (EUR 5.2 million) are used for making information transparent for potential applicants and employers, and 67% (EUR 10.6 million) are invested in EaSI supported services for ensuring jobseekers successful integration in the labour market.
The network consists of around 1 500 EURES staff, 90% of which work for PES.
Each regional EURES office has one IT person. Depending on the country, EURES staff is organised in different ways.
- National Public Employment Services have the complete control over their own data;
- An automatic vacancy count is performed every 30 minutes;
- Jobseekers can perform searches in different languages.
Involvement of stakeholders in EURES’ processes is vital in EURES success: stakeholders help in identifying skill gaps and qualified workforce but also ensure an adequate matching and recruitment process.
- A more coherent application of clearance, support services and exchange of information on labour mobility within the Union is needed. The EURES network is becoming therefore re-established and reorganised;
- The EC and the Member States will broaden the EURES network as the main Union tool for delivering recruitment services;
- The European Coordination Office will provide common information, tools and guidance, training activities developed together with Member States, and a helpdesk function;
- A Coordination Group is getting established to exercise a coordinating role;
- Introduction of a new extranet enabling learning, collaboration and connection within the EURES network.